


Making a Home at the End of the World

by Starlingthefool



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Jaeger Pilots, Kaiju (Pacific Rim), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-14
Updated: 2018-01-14
Packaged: 2019-03-04 04:49:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13356849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starlingthefool/pseuds/Starlingthefool
Summary: Harry is a Jaeger pilot, and Draco is in the K-Science division. Together, they fightcrimeKaiju! Actually, they mostly fight each other.





	Making a Home at the End of the World

**Author's Note:**

> This was a secret satan fic exchange for a friend, who asked for some cheerful Harry/Draco OR Pacific Rim, but my brain decided to smush them together and write some apocalyptic feelings. Oops.

**Wiltshire, 2013.**

 

Draco always had a little too much sympathy for monsters. Not his fault, he’ll occasionally say; his parents are landed gentry, rich and inbred and convinced that wealth confers superiority. He inherited the belief along with his pale skin and weakened immune system: might makes right. If you couldn’t outfight, out-maneuver, or out-gun something, you were obsolete.

Draco is fifteen on K-Day. The BBC plays footage of San Francisco and Sacramento on a loop for weeks; gray ash and blue blood staining the ground. Draco watches it from his bedroom in his parents’ ancestral heap, which only got wired for internet a few years before. And he looks around at the old manor house he’s spent most of his life in; it’s three and a half centuries old, and housed generations of ancestors while they lived, and kept their bones when they died. He realizes then: everything that he’s considered steady and sturdy and true and safe in his life is a lie.

 _Home_ is meaning, understanding, a map of the world and one’s place in it. _Home_ is a frame of mind, and an understanding of time, the relationship between the past and the future. _Home_ , at its core, does not stand up well to giant bloody lizards stomping out of the sea and destroying entire cities.

When home is gone, some people rebuild on the first steady thing they find. Others abandon the idea of home altogether. What’s the bloody point, really? Something bigger, stronger, fitter, and faster has decided it wants what humanity has. So it goes. Draco’s parents raised him to consider this the natural order of things. They got a lot wrong, but not that, he thinks; the proof was a thirty-five mile wide swath of destruction that leveled two cities and rendered a good chunk of American coastline uninhabitable.

There’s no going back. And the only way that Draco knew to make peace with extinction is to understand what the damn hell will be replacing him.

* * *

**London, 2017.**

 

He doesn’t tell his parents that he’s signing up for the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps.  He’s not sure if he’s more afraid of his mother’s tears or his father’s fists, so he forsakes the possibility of either. He leaves a note, says he’ll contact them when he can (a lie), and he takes a taxi to the train station at four in the morning. Draco presses his fingers to the cool glass and wonders if he’ll ever see any of this again; the rolling hills, the neat gardens and hedgerows. He wonders what he’ll do if another breach opens, this one in the Atlantic, maybe the North or Irish Sea.

Nothing; he’ll do nothing. There will be nothing he possibly can do. Draco shuts his eyes for a moment, imagining what it will look like. Then he opens them again, and memorizes the fields, the hills, the towns and churches.

The recruitment officer in London confirms that the PPDC will pay for his education after his term of service ends, with additional on-the-job training in the K-Science division. Good enough. Better than going into business, like his father wanted.

There’s a boy his age on the military flight to Sydney. He looks… well, he looks poor.  Wary. Dark-skinned and with a scar crackling down his face, narrowly missing his right eye. Extremely hot in a damaged way, which Draco has a terrible weakness for.

“Half these wankers think they’re going to be piloting Jaegers,” he says to the boy. “I’m going in to the science division. They’ve got a smaller fatality rate, and it’s not all fame- and glory-chasing dickheads. What about you?”

“You think that’s the only reason people want to join the Jaeger Academy?” the boy says. He’s looking at Draco like he’s a bug. “Fame and glory?”

“I’m sure some of them are also suicidal,” Draco says. He’s aware that the tickle in his throat is probably him shoving his foot even further into his mouth, but there’s no point in stopping now. “Cannon fodder. Dulce et decorum est, and all that rot.”

“I’d rather be cannon fodder than a Kaiju groupie,” he says, and moves to the back of the plane, where the other witless oafs are laughing it up on their way to their graves.

* * *

**Sydney, 2018.**

 

“Why do we even need combat training?” Draco asks Snape, the head of the science division.

Snape gazes at him. “Do remember that you’re a soldier in this war, Mr. Malfoy. You’re not owed an explanation for anything.”

It’s Snape’s way of reminding Draco how disposable he is to this operation. It turns out he’s rather terrible at taking orders in this brave new world. “They can’t be so desperate for pilots that they’re going to be start co-opting us,” Draco says. “Surely they haven’t churned through that many already.”

Then he’s on the ground, looking up at Snape, struggling to recover his lost breath. Bloody hell.

“Combat training is useful for opponents _other_ than giant monsters, Mr. Malfoy.”

He gasps out, “Yes, sir.”

“Good. Get up. Start the drill from the beginning.”

**

During the first inter-division sparring training, Draco gets his ass roundly handed to him by one of cadets, a black girl with a suburban London accent named Granger, who was supposedly recruited from the J-Tech division. He restores some karmic balance by nailing a red-haired boy in the bollocks with his staff within 30 seconds of his next fight.

“It was an accident!” he says, trying for innocence. He’s apparently lost the knack, considering the way that Granger is glaring at him, fingers curled around her staff. He’ll probably be sleeping with one eye open for the next two months; she seems like a plotter, that one. “We should really be wearing protective gear,” he says.

The fightmaster, a skinny man named Lupin that Snape constantly disparages, sighs. “Hermione, get Ron an ice pack. Harry?”

Lupin beckons the boy with the scar forward.  Good lord, he’s put some muscle on in the intervening months. Draco swallows. He saw Scarhead fight Hermione as a demonstration, and the two matched each other blow for blow, always stopping an inch short of cracking bone. Draco doesn’t think much of combat, or Jaeger pilots, but even he could see that the two of them shared something special; it was beautiful, a dance.  

“Are you ready?” the boy asks.

Draco _tsks_ beneath his breath. What a stupid thing to ask someone you’re about to fight.

They bow, and then step back into fighting stances. The boy waits, looking like he’s carved out of stone. Draco circles him, trying to buy some time, invite an attack, something. He feints, and the boy flinches. Draco takes a moment to sneer – what kind of idiots are they recruiting? By the time he realizes he shouldn’t have dropped his guard, the boy’s practically on top of him. Draco blocks the blows, but his legs are unguarded and he’s off-balance, and seconds later, he’s on the ground, with the boy’s staff pressed into the sensitive spot behind his ear.

“1-0,” Lupin calls out. Draco catches a look at Snape’s face; it’s sourer than usual, and more worrying, disappointed. It’s not a face that he catches from Snape often. Draco pushes himself to his feet and squares off with Scarhead again.

“You shouldn’t underestimate us Kaiju fodder,” the boy says. At least Draco succeeded in making himself memorable.

“Did I hurt your feelings, Scarhead?” Draco answers. Emotional maturity is for lesser beings.

“Did I hurt your pride?” the boy answers. “It was probably already bruised from losing to Hermione.”

“Ready,” Lupin calls.

The boy bows, and Draco attacks. It’s bad form, sure, but so is losing. He’s aware that the others in the Jaeger program are shouting at him, and that he’ll probably be needing to watch his back forever around Granger, but in the moment, he’s aware only of a loose and hazy anger stretching over him. The boy doesn’t even stumble, just moves fluidly out of the way and cracks his staff across Draco’s shoulders.

“2-0,” Lupin calls out. Fucker.

There’s a burning ache spreading across Draco’s shoulders, and a blush spreading across his cheeks. Neither of them waits for Lupin’s word this time before attacking. The burning sensation spreads across his shoulders and down his arms the longer they fight. Draco’s out of tricks, and all he’s got is the blood pounding in his ears, the anger threading through his veins; all he’s got is the fight directly in front of him.

He’ll lovingly treasure the memory of the sound his staff makes as he cracks it across the back of the boy’s knees, and the look of surprise after he follows it up with a strike to gut. He doesn’t have time to gloat, unfortunately, because then Scarhead cracks his staff across Draco’s jaw and he goes down like a ton of bricks.

**

He’s got a mild concussion, so it’s possible that he dreams up the conversation between Lupin and Snape in the infirmary.

Lupin: “He’s got tremendous potential as a pilot.”

Snape: “You’ve children lining up around the world to join the Jaeger Academy.” Derision drips from his voice. “This one can do far more good in K-Science.”

Lupin: “We need everyone we can get, at least for cross-training. You know the washout rate as well as I do. ”

Snape: “And that the mortality rate for Jaeger pilots is quite a bit higher than the propaganda say, aren’t they?”

Silence from Lupin.

Snape: “You may be fine with sacrificing your best and brightest, Lupin, but I--"

Lupin: “You may want to reconsider whatever is about to come out of your mouth, Severus. And who you’re talking to. ”

Silence from both of them.

Snape: “Rather proves my point, doesn’t it?” He doesn’t sound derisive anymore. He just sounds tired, and angry.

Footsteps, then a door shutting softly. There's a story there, Draco thinks to himself. A story begging to be dragged up out of its grave.

Then again, so what if there is? Stories and graves are common enough. Draco wills himself back to sleep.

**

He doesn’t hallucinate the boy coming to see him. He knows that because he brings Draco chocolate.

“Sorry,” the boy says, without any preamble.

Draco’s jaw is no longer too swollen to speak, so he asks. “For what?”

“Fighting dirty,” the boy replies.

“Why in God’s name would you apologize for that?” Draco says.

The boy snorts. “I suppose you did start it.”

He rubs his fingers against the knot in his jaw, though it’s still nearly too tender to touch. “And you finished it.”

The boy shoves his hands into the pockets of his jumpsuit. “Er. Yeah. Guess I did.”

The blush barely shows on the boy’s skin; just the scar, which turns a darker purple.

“What’s your name, anyway?” Draco asks brusquely. “I probably shouldn’t keep calling you Scarhead or Kaiju Fodder.”

“Potter,” he says.

“Malfoy,” Draco answers. He stops for a moment, remembering what Lupin called him. “Wait, are you—“

“I should go,” Harry Potter, the last survivor of the Manila attack, says. “Sorry about—er. Your face. Right. Anyway.”

Draco watches him scuttle out of the room. He thinks of the video that made the name Harry Potter famous across the world: the body of a skinny teenage boy being pulled out of the British embassy, covered in dirt, two kinds of blood dried on his face: rusty brown and bright blue. The last living human they carried out of the ruined sections of the city; after Potter, it was corpses all the way down.

Draco looks at the Cadbury Dairy Milk on the table by his bed, touches the bruise again, and wonders what in the hell is going through Potter's head.

**

The next inter-division sparring match, he doesn’t fight Potter. The other fights are nothing to write home about; he either wins or he loses, and there’s nothing interesting to them. He does get the opportunity to watch Granger, the red-haired boy, and Potter in some sort of melee with another group. There’s a level of communication there that looks like it’s taking place at the cellular level between the three of them. Nothing like his and Potter’s bloody scrap. The three of them move like they’ve been choreographed.

Snape whispers in his ear. “Do you envy them?”

Draco starts. “Of course not.”

“Good,” he says. "Watch what happens when one of them is taken out of the equation."

A few moments later, Lupin taps the ginger and sends him out of the ring. The fight resumes, and it's still impressive, but the beauty and grace is gone. Granger and Potter both fight well, but their rhythm is off, and they seem to trip up against each other’s presence without the red-haired boy in the mix. It’s not a dance anymore. They have to work around each other, and it slows them both down.

“The Jaegers require two or more people to be in machine-assisted synchronicity," Snape says. "The Pons system itself has a tendency to overload its users, even as it spreads the pain out among the pilots. It builds connections that aren't supposed to be there, and when they're gone...”

“It’s a strength that’s also a weakness,” Draco says. Relying on other people always is.

“Rather like the Jaeger program itself,” Snape sniffs. “We’re lulling ourselves into complacency. The Kaiju are smarter than most would like to imagine. They’ll not let themselves get beaten down by the giant machines forever.”

Potter and Granger are both out of breath, sweating, and starting to get clumsy. One of their opponents nearly lands a hit on Granger, and is only saved by Potter getting between them. He takes the hit for her across his forearm, and loses his grip on his staff. His opponent slides in, and Lupin blows his whistle as the staff touches Potter’s neck.

“Best not to get attached to any of it,” Snape says in a low, harsh voice. “Or them.”

He’s still thinking about Snape’s pessimism about the Jaegers when he hits the showers after the sparring match. He takes longer than usual, letting the warm water run down his body, just wanting to luxuriate in it for a moment.

He looks over his shoulder as he hears another showerhead turn on, and is confronted by the sight of Potter, naked body not quite obscured by the steam. “Wasting all the hot water, are we?” he asks.

Draco grins. “If you’re that concerned about conservation, we could always share.”

He went to an all-boys school, he played cricket, and he’s used to games of gay chicken in locker rooms. Potter’s supposed to one-up him, make some casually flirtatious joke back, so that they can both laugh it off. Potter, apparently, never went to school because he was too busy being a public face of the Kaiju War, because he just looks at Malfoy like a rabbit caught in a lorry’s headlights, then ducks his head back under the spray like he’s trying to drown himself.

Oh. _Oh._

Malfoy turns back to his own shower for a moment, hysterical laughter nearly bubbling out of his throat. The smart thing to do would be to just leave, or let them both stew in their awkwardness until they’re done, and not get attached. Snape’s smart; smart enough for Draco to trust his judgment, at least. All these pretty cadets are probably doomed.

On the other hand, giant extra-dimensional monsters have destroyed half-a-dozen cities in the last four years, and Draco hasn’t had sex with anyone outside of his right hand in eight months.

He shuts off his shower, then walks over to Potter’s stall. Potter jumps when Draco enters his field of vision, gapes as Draco reaches over to adjust the temperature. He likes it warm, but apparently Potter likes it scalding. Draco takes his time fiddling with the taps, hoping to think up some smart remark, devastatingly flirtatious and debonair and sexy. When that fails, he just raises his eyebrows at Potter and says, “If you’re going to kick my ass for being a filthy queer, try to avoid my face this time.”

Potter kisses him instead, pressing his whole body to Draco’s, like he wants to get under Draco’s skin. Draco has a moment of worry, thinking again of Snape’s words – _best not to get too attached_ . This is a horrible idea. There are cold tiles pressing up against the healing bruises across his shoulders, and Potter is kissing him with a lot more enthusiasm than finesse, and Draco hasn’t been this turned on _ever._ It’s a truly awful idea, and he has absolutely zero interest in not carrying it through.

Potter is rubbing off on him, skin slippery with water and soap, kissing Draco like he wants to devour him. “You haven’t done this before, have you?” Draco asks.

Potter pushes his hair out of his face. “Er. Sort of? Not like – not with…”

Draco takes pity on him. Potter’s not the best conversationalist. His body speaks volumes, though; straining towards Draco’s touch, eager. Draco lets his hand drift down onto Potter’s cock, cupping it gently. “So I suppose that nobody’s ever sucked you off in a semi-public place.”

Potter’s dick twitches in his hand, which is enough of a _yes_ to go on with.

“Any objections to making that happen?” Draco says, sliding down Potter’s body.

“Oh my god,” Potter says.

Draco’s enjoying this entirely too much. “Is that a yes? I need some kind of affirmation, here.”

“No. No objections, I mean. Are you really going to—oh, oh _fuck._ ”

* * *

**Tokyo, 2019.**

 

Draco’s heart always jumps in his throat when he sees Potter in his drivesuit, with Granger and Weasley at his heels. You’d think he’d be used to it by now. It’s not the first time he’s seen Harry in the suit, or even the first time he’s gone into battle. First times don’t matter nearly as much as to whether it could be the _last_ time.

Harry's heading up to the cockpit of _Gryffin Bravo_ and Draco's heading to Mission Control, and they're surrounded by people. Draco is caught between wanting to kiss Harry and wanting to avert his eyes from the sight of him; he can never shake the strange belief that making too much of a goodbye will somehow magically ensure it's their final one. He can't stop himself from looking back over his shoulder though, after they pass in the crowded hallway. Harry's doing the same, and holds Draco in his gaze for a heavy moment before they're both swept away from each other.

The next time they see each other is nearly 60 hours later. Malfoy stumbles out of the lab and up towards Mission Control. Harry’s overseeing repairs on _Gryffin Bravo_ , the Mach-4 that he pilots with Granger and Weasley. He’s in a loose jumpsuit, hair a mess, but that’s normal. Draco hasn’t slept in two days, and he can still smell the strange, salt-and-ammonia smell of Kaiju blood on his skin. There’s no longitudinal studies on Kaiju blood exposure yet. He wonders if, in twenty years, Kaiju harvesters will all be mad as the hatters who died of mercury poisoning.

Harry abandons whatever he’s doing when Draco stumbles into Mission Control. “They’ve got two brains,” Draco says raggedly. “Do you know what this means?”

It’s the first time he’s seen them up close: the great, glowing orbs of their brains. Most Kaiju were brought in with massive trauma after getting pummeled by the Jaegers. This one had been brought down by a single slice through the neck, nearly severing the spinal column but leaving the brain pan entirely intact.

“No?” Harry answers. “What?”

“ _That’s just it_ ,” Draco shouts. “Nobody knows what that means! Their anatomy just makes no logical kind of sense. It flies in the face of everything we know about evolution. Their cellular structure, how they convert energy—“

“Right,” Harry says. “When’s the last time you slept?”

Draco scoffs. “Sleep? Why?”

“Come with me.”  Harry abandons his clipboard and takes Draco by the arm. “If this is all so exciting, why aren’t you still in the lab?”

Snape had kicked him out, truth be told. Had the bloody temerity to haul Draco out by the ear and lock the door behind him. “Lunch break,” Draco says.

“You do realize it’s half past ten.”

“Breakfast break, then,” Draco says.

“Half ten _at night,_ Draco _._ ”

How should he know? The lab doesn’t have any windows. “Are you saying that we should limit ourselves to when breakfast can be eaten? Because I’m afraid I’m with the Americans on this one—"

Harry pushes him up against a wall and kisses him. Draco’s train of thought isn’t on very steady tracks as it is, and promptly derails.

“We’re going back to my room,” Harry says, soft and low into his ear. “And we’re going to fuck, if you can stay awake long enough for it. And then you’re going to sleep.”

Draco’s about to argue, but Harry bites gently at the tendons in his neck, teeth worrying a little at the skin below his ear. “Fine,” Draco breathes. “Fine, okay, _yes_ , fuck—"

Harry’s grinding against him a little. “All I wanted after the battle was to find you , and you were—“

“Up to my elbows in Kaiju guts,” Draco says.

“Did you see it?” Harry asks. “The battle.”

He never watches the fights. Not since the first one, when Snape actually ordered him to go out with the containment unit. Draco realized later what a kindness that was, and volunteers for it now. Not that he'll tell Harry that. More magical thinking -- Harry can't die if Draco's not watching him, surely.

He kisses Harry so he doesn’t have to answer him. He lets him pull them both into his narrow room, yanks Harry’s body down onto his, allows himself to be pressed into the mattress by the weight of him. He’s so tired that it all feels like a dream: the coarse strands of hair between his fingers, the thin mattress beneath his back, the sharp pleasure of getting fucked, Harry’s teeth pressing into the meat of his shoulder. For the first time since he watched the BBC’s long, panning shots of destruction on the California coastline, he feels a sort of sullen hopefulness. He doesn’t want to, but he can’t seem to help it. Two days of sleep deprivation have made him susceptible to all sorts of idiotic notions: optimism being the first and foremost.

“Don’t stop,” he tells Harry. “Please, just—"

Harry leans down to kiss the words out of his mouth, and Draco comes like that, his orgasm punching through him. He goes boneless, can feel his exhaustion creeping on him, immersing him in warm relaxation. He lasts long enough to feel Harry orgasm, but is half-asleep by the time the other man wipes him clean with a cool, damp cloth.

“You sleeping in here tonight, then?” Harry says. Draco doesn’t answer, just burrows down into the duvet covering them, into the heat of Harry’s body and the familiar scent of his skin.

Draco’s disoriented when he wakes, unsure as to what time it is, where he is, and what he’s supposed to be doing. Harry’s no longer in bed, but sitting at the foot of it. His shoulders are hunched peculiarly.

“What is it?” Draco mutters, trying to shake the sleep out of his head.

Harry starts, and looks over his shoulder at Draco. His face is lit by the thin, blue light of his tablet, and it washes out the forking scar on his forehead and cheek. “Manila,” he says. “They’re calling it a category four.”

That’s when Draco damns himself. “A category four?” he asks, too half-awake to keep the excitement from bleeding into his voice. “Let me see.”

He pulls the tablet from Harry’s limp fingers, too excited to notice his lover’s reaction. A category four, he thinks instead. _A fucking category four_. Snape helped develop the scale with Professor Serizawa, back when category three Kaiju were still rare. 

He flips through a couple of the pictures – the Kaiju’s one of the tallest he’s ever seen, four arms, and are those wings vestigial or can this thing actually get airborne? He doesn’t realize what’s happened until he says, “Hel _lo_ gorgeous. Where did you say this was?”

At Harry’s silence, he looks up. Harry’s looking at him with the same expression he remembers from the military transport from London; like Draco’s something he wants to scrape off his shoe as quickly as possibly.

“Manila,” Harry says. Whispers, really, like the word has to be scraped up out of the very back of his throat. Like he’s still a teenage boy being pulled out of the destroyed British embassy, with both of his parents’ blood still clinging to his skin, and it’s hard to talk around the masonry dust and ash in his throat.

“Fuck,” Draco says. “Harry, I—"

An alarm starts blaring. “I have to suit up,” Harry says. His voice sounds like he’s talking to a stranger. “Snape will probably want you, too. After the battle’s over, so you two can dissect that fucking thing.”

“Harry—"

He doesn’t wait for Draco to get dressed; just opens the door and slips out, slamming the door behind him.  


**

It’s not long after that they start losing the war.

 

* * *

**Osaka, 2023.**

 

Draco quits before they fire them. The UN’s been allocating less and less money towards the PPDC, and the K-science division has been bleeding funds, resources, and people for the last year. Draco read the writing on the wall, and started making contacts in the smuggling business. He’s well-positioned to move from consulting and selling on the side to dealing directly in Kaiju parts.

He wonders what Snape would have had to say about it. Maybe, _Even rats know when it’s time to abandon a sinking ship,_ or, _I told you not to get attached to it, to any of it_. Snape died in the Sydney attacks, though, so wondering is all that Draco can do.

He doesn’t bother wondering what Harry would have said. Sixteen Jaegers have been destroyed, and the others are being decommissioned, including _Gryffin Bravo_. Last time Draco saw him, Harry was on his way to Anchorage, and it was just like the times when he was being deployed to a battle; the two of them passing each other in a crowded hall, forced in different directions by the crowds of people behind them. Only this time, when Draco looked back, Harry kept his eyes forward.

Likely as not, Harry would have nothing to say about it at all.

 

* * *

**Hong Kong, 2025.**

  


“Mr. Malfoy?” It’s Zheng, security at the front desk. Draco pauses his examination of his latest shipment.

“What is it?” he says. They’re supposedly Kaiju stomach giblets, these carbonate rocks the size of his fist, but he’s not yet convinced. They’ll still be good enough for the traditional medicine crowd, who never concern themselves too closely with authenticity. He still prefers to carve up the Kaiju carcasses himself – or at least make his underlings do it while he supervises – but he's diversified into fencing Kaiju parts.

“There’s a Hermione Granger to see you.”

Draco leans back on his stool. “Hermione Granger, did you say,” he asks, although he already knows the answer. He’s seen the re-commissioned _Gryffin Bravo_ being flown into the Shatterdome -- the last Shatterdome still standing, though it's supposedly going to be decommissioned next year. He assumed it would only be a matter of time before the Three Musketeers were reunited. He didn’t figure on any of them tracking him down.

Hermione comes in with a briefcase in one hand and a steaming bowl in the other. “Your… secretary or bodyguard, whatever, he asked me to bring this to you.”

Draco pulls off his gloves and grins “Did he, now?”

Hermione huffs. “He said you’re less of an arse when you’re well-fed.” She hands over the bowl. “Not that I’ve ever known you to be less of an arse.”

“Military rations aren’t all they’re cracked up to be,” he replies tartly. He washes his hands and opens the container. The noodles smell delicious, and there’s a veritable mountain of brisket on them. “What do you want, Granger? And keep in mind, I may be less of an arse after I eat, but I am a businessman now. Time is money, etcetera.”

“A Kaiju’s second brain,” she says. “As fresh as you can get it.”

He looks up from the act of cracking apart his chopsticks. “All right. Color me intrigued. Why do you need a Kaiju secondary brain?”

“ _Why_ isn’t part of the deal,” Hermione says. She heaves a suitcase onto the table and pops the locks. There’s a… rather surprising amount of cash in it. “Can you get me the brains or not?”

Draco grins at her. “Oh, I can. But see, now I’m curious.”

She glares at him. He has a sudden memory of their first and only sparring match, when she wiped the floor with him, calm and cool, not even deigning to respond to his insults _._ The whole episode made him grudgingly respect her, if not particularly like her. The reverse, of course, was not true.

Draco kicks his shoes up onto his desk and starts digging into his noodles. “Secondary brain controls memory and communication, or so we think. Did you know that some dodgy bastards actually cut it with LSD and drop it in their eyes? Claim it gives them visions into another world.”

“Does it?” Hermione asks, and Draco looks up at her. There’s an unexpected urgency in her voice.

“Of course it fucking doesn’t, it’s LSD. They’re hallucinations.”  

“But the Kaiju brain tissue—“

“Makes it a pretty blue and eats holes into your optic nerve, and eventually your brain.” Draco, as delicately as he can, shovels some noodles into his mouth. “I’ve seen the MRI scans. Imagine mad cow disease crossed with a glowworm. It’s not pretty. Well, it’s sort of pretty. Anyway. ”

He stares her down as he chews. “Assuming you don’t plan on making dodgy drugs with this brain, what are you planning to do with it?” he asks.

“Why do you care?” she shoots back. “You said yourself, you’re a businessman. Just looking to build up a mountain of cash, like that’ll be any kind of comfort when the planet burns.”

“I told you, I’m curious.”

Hermione closes the suitcase. “You might be curious, but you’re also not the only supplier in town.”

She turns to go.

“Wait!” he says, setting down the noodles. He’s about to talk shit about the two competitors in the city, but the question slips out, entirely unintended: “How is he?”

She looks at him like she’s really seeing him; past the slicked-back hair and the Kaiju-skin boots, past the curls of tattoos that rise out of his collar. She’s looking past all of that and seeing the eighteen year-old kid in a stained labcoat that hid crippling existential doubt behind a cocky attitude. Her regard makes his skin itch.

“Forget I asked,” he says quickly. “Listen, if you go to Hannibal Chau—"

“He’s struggling,” Hermione says. “Harry. He can’t connect the way he used to. Ron says it’s harder to find him in the Drift. And it’s just the two of them sharing the neural load on Gryffin since I’ve been grounded.”

“Grounded,” Draco says. “Shit, are you— Is it cancer?" Most of the first gen pilots had died of it or were in the process of dying of it. The Mark Two and Threes had better shielding for their cores, but still—

“No, you ass! I’m bloody pregnant,” she says. “With a child that has inherited her father’s _utterly_ crap timing.”

“Well, thank fuck for that.” He’s not fond of her, but he’s not such a knob that he’d wish her dead. “Although—god, you’ve procreated with _Weasley_? Well, no accounting for taste, I suppose.”

He recognizes the look on her face a half-second before she slaps him across the face. Christ, the _arm_ on her; retirement didn’t soften her a bit.  

“You _prick_ , Malfoy. You’re sitting here, naffing about, building up your little smuggling empire—“ She kicks his desk, sending the giblets rolling about in their trays.

“Oy!” he shouts.

 _“We’re losing this war!”_ she shouts. “How can you pretend not to care?”

There are tears in her eyes, raindrops in her hair. He gets walloped with a memory, her sitting between Harry and Weasley up in the catwalks above _Gryffin Bravo,_ giggling at some joke one of them had just told. They were all so young; they still are. It’s strange, really, the way that ages suddenly account for so much less when there’s a war on.

Draco doesn’t know how to put it any kinder than this: “We’ve always been losing the war. We just convinced ourselves otherwise for a while.”

She starts to answer, and he spills it all out, everything that was in Snape’s notes, everything that haunts him when he’s trying to sleep. “Listen to me. Every Kaiju is genetically identical. You understand the implication of that, right? They’re clones. They’re _engineered_ with one purpose, and that’s to _end_ us. Whoever designed them has every advantage over humanity, and we don’t know fuck all about them. As it stands? We don’t have a chance of winning, and we never did.”

She stares at him for a moment. “Was that supposed to be a revelation or something?”

Draco gapes at her a bit. “I mean… Well—“

“Did you seriously think I didn’t know that?” Hermione raises her eyebrows, puts her hands on her hips. Draco hasn’t felt this wrong-footed since primary school, staring down the Headmistress and trying to insist that he absolutely had no idea who had set that fire in the science lab. “God, Malfoy. You’re such a – you know what? Forget it. Take the fucking cash and just get me a fucking brain.”

**

He gets her the fucking brain. But it’s Harry who shows up to his lab.

**

“You’re going to _what?”_

Draco is aware that he’s shrieking, which is not the image he tries to cultivate in front of his staff. But--

It’s enough just seeing Harry, seeing all the ways he’s changed and the ways he hasn’t. More muscle, less fat, more lines in his face, more stubble, rougher edges, darker circles beneath his eyes. The scar has faded a little, in the intervening five years. His eyes haven’t changed at all, except in the way they avoid looking into Draco’s.

“I’m going to drift with a Kaiju,” Harry says. Like it’s normal; like, _I’m going to have some tea with breakfast_ , or _I’m going to walk to work instead of taking the bus_. Harry nods at mess of equipment he’d hauled up front the street and dropped in front of the dead baby Kaiju that Draco had gotten. Now that Draco understands what Harry meant to do, he can see the basic components of a Pons system in the tangle of wires and hardware.

“It was Hermione’s idea, but—"

“But you decided to be the one to carry out this madness?” Draco says. He looks around at Zheng, who’s wearing his best _should I defenestrate the nutjob_  expression. Draco waves him out of the room. Zheng shrugs – Draco pays him well, but not well enough to argue when Draco’s being an idiot – and leaves.

“She told you about her, uh.” Harry gestures at his stomach.

“Weasley’s love child, yes, and its impending spawning.”

Harry starts assembling the Pons system. “Neural bridging stresses the body and the brain. It could cause a miscarriage, and Hermione wants the baby.”

“Also you’re mind melding with a bloody alien, rather than your BFF,” Draco says. He feels ill. “Harry—"

“You have a defibrillator in here, right?” Harry asks. “In case of… er. Just in case.”

Draco stares at him. “You know, all the times I imagined talking to you again, I never once thought that it would be with a dead Kaiju fetus in the room, and I did not think you’d be asking me if I had the equipment to _restart your heart_ , you fucking _wanker._ ” Draco wants to rip the wires out of Harry’s hand and strangle him with them. Does the bloody idiot really put so little value on his own life?

“…Is that a no on the defibrillator, then?” Harry asks.

Draco stalks around the table to him. Harry watches him warily, hands fisted at his sides, ready for a fight. Draco is struck by a wave of missing Harry, feeling the shape of that absence, still sharply outlined after five years. He misses fighting Harry, fucking him, arguing with him, misses all the ways they collided into each other. It wasn’t the beautiful choreography of seeing him with Granger and Weasley. It was messy and off-balance, and always uniquely theirs.

“Look at me,” Draco demands. Harry keeps his eyes on the rat’s nest of wires he’s trying to untangle. “Did Hermione actually send you? Does she—what am I even asking, of course she doesn’t know you’re here, she would have—"

“She would have talked me out of it,” Harry says. Christ, he sounds exhausted. “Or just knocked me unconscious and gone herself, or—“

“Or talked some bloody sense into you.” Draco grabs Harry’s face and jerks his face up. Both his eyes are bloodshot, and there are broken capillaries in his cheeks. He looks further down, and finds spots of blood on his collar. “You’ve been overloading. Tell me, have you started suffering actual seizures yet, or are you still in the vomiting and nosebleed stage?”

Harry bats Draco’s hand away. “Look. There’s nobody else. It has to be me.”

“Bollocks,” Draco says. “There’s got to be…”

But he trails off. He’s fairly sure that Dumbledore and the crew at the Shatterdome probably didn’t approve Granger’s plan; else they’d be doing this in Mission Control and not in Draco’s lab. And if it’s not Harry, it’s Granger or Weasley.

“Figured it out, have you?” Harry says, his tone cold. “Are you going to let me do this here, or do I figure out a way to strap a Kaiju brain to the boot of the car outside?”

Draco unbuttons his collar and yanks off his tie. “You’re doing it here,” he says. “But you’re not doing it alone. You better have another of those stupid helmets in that mess.” He presses the intercom button on the wall.  “Zheng. My will is up to date, right?”

“I believe so, Mr. Malfoy. Would you like me to check?”

“No, just get in here. I need you to standby with a defibrillator while I do something incredibly stupid.”

**

Draco recognizes this feeling, the Drift, from that long-ago day, sitting in his parents’ house and watching everything he thought he knew about the world falling to ash. He’s sitting in his cold, drafty room, and the world is ending. The world is ending, and nothing he can do will ever fix it.

_Draco._

That memory is overlaid with literal ashes, somehow, the taste of smoke and the harsh scent of ammonia. The floorboards under Draco’s feet start to shake. This—this never happened. But it did. The monsters came, down from the deep like boogeymen, and they tore down everything he ever thought was safe.

_Draco._

The world ended. Everything that he knew as _home_ was broken, and it can never be fixed, and nothing means what he thought it once did. The floorboards of his childhood bedroom tremble. The windows crack and then shatter in their frames, and an ear-splitting roar rends the air around him. The walls are tumbling down around him, great chunks of debris narrowly missing him. He shuts his eyes, waiting for—

“Draco!”

They’re in the locker room in the old Sydney Shatterdome. Harry’s got his hands on Draco’s face, gazing at him like he’s been searching for him for him. The showers are going, and steam is rising into the air. Draco recognizes that scent of bleach and sweat and military-issue soap, the tang of welding that drifted through the whole site. It’s instinct, he tells himself, to lean forward and press his lips to Harry’s. It’s what the memory demands.

“Do you know where you are?” Harry asks, when they part.

Draco blinks. “The Drift. What happened?”

“I should have warned you,” Harry said. “Our memories got tangled up, I think. Yours from K-Day, mine from Manila.”

“Tangled?” Draco says. “Is that the technical term?”

Harry rolls his eyes. “Right. We’re on a mission, remember?”

“Right,” Draco says, gazing around. The Sydney Shatterdome was destroyed along with the Kaiju Wall a few weeks ago. “Sure. Did I bring us here or did you?”

Harry’s still standing close, though he’s no longer holding on to Draco’s face. “It’s belongs to both of us,” he says.

Draco thinks that he could happily linger here forever, but the Jaeger techs always warned against that, didn’t they? Chasing rabbits, they called it. Chasing memories, and the familiar; the last vestiges of home.

“Are you ready?” Harry asks. In response, Draco leans forward, pausing long enough to give Harry time to back away or say no. Instead, Harry meets him, kissing him softly; not in honor of a memory, but, Draco thinks, maybe a promise of something new.

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends,” Draco says, grinning.

Harry’s nose wrinkles. “Did you just – god, of course you’d quote Shakespeare at a time like this, you tosser.”


End file.
